Beefing Up Security With Web Application Firewalls

If you’re fortunate enough to have a growing online business, you will find your hosting needs growing along with it. What may have started as a single server may now begin to resemble a burgeoning IT shop, with multiple web servers, database servers, mail servers, and file servers. All businesses reach a threshold where security and reliability of the environment becomes paramount – to the point where it becomes a higher priority to protect the assets and infrastructure before investing any further in functionality and business growth. One of the first appliances deployed to protect that infrastructure is a firewall, which can be defined as a hardware and/or software appliance whose primary purpose is to protect network resources by limiting or eliminating unauthorized access to those resources. While larger businesses often opt to invest in hardware firewalls capable of on-the-fly packet filtering, encryption of all incoming and outgoing requests, and processing of extremely large numbers of concurrent connections, small-to-mid-sized businesses are often best served by software firewalls and specifically Web Application Firewalls, or WAFs.

One popular web application firewall is dotDefender. dotDefender is designed to provide website security against malicious attacks and website defacement attempts. It offers enterprise-class security, advanced integration capabilities, easy maintenance, and low total cost of ownership (TCO). dotDefender is a sophisticated web application firewall that secures your website using pattern recognition to analyze all incoming traffic, session protection which monitors runtime user sessions and prevents invalid tampering, and upload inspection, for monitoring uploads of all files to the local file system.

Another popular option used because it is available by default in many Windows-based installation is the Windows Firewall. Windows Firewall primarily focuses on limiting access from unwanted applications but does not do any runtime monitoring of user sessions or inbound/outbound traffic signatures.

When selecting a web hosting provider, it is important to determine if the hosting provider is able to provide a range of products (such as hardware firewalls, software firewalls, web application firewalls, spam filters, etc) and services (such as configuration and management of firewall products) that can allow your hosted application infrastructure to grow as your business grows.